Alexander Lebed

First we will act, then we will explain.

Alexander Lebed, 1995

Part I. Biography and Image

Lt. Gen. Alexander Ivanovich Lebed (ret.) traded his military uniform for a
politician's suit on May 30, 1995, resigning his position as the commander
of the 14th Russian Army based in Moldova. By the beginning of the summer,
he was one of the most popular politicians in Russia. 45-year-old
Lebed is a charismatic
figure whose dry wit and brusque, no-nonsense style sets him apart from
most of the familiar faces of Moscow's political elite. One widely cited
Public Opinion Foundation
poll from July showed that if Lebed and Yeltsin faced each other in a
runoff, Lebed would garner 38% of the vote and Yeltsin only 8%. But, as
potential Russian voters became more familiar with him, his popularity fell
to the level of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin,
Yabloko leader Grigory
Yavlinsky, and Communist Party leader
Gennady Zyuganov, according to a
later poll by the same organization.

Lebed has participated in most of the former Soviet Union's and
Russia's military conflicts for the last fifteen years. He fought in
Afghanistan in 1981-82. He was part of the forces that quelled unrest in
the Caucasus: after the anti-Armenian pogrom in Sumgait in the autumn of
1988, the crackdown in Tbilisi in April 1989, and the occupation of Baku in
January 1990. During the 1991 coup, Lebed was sent with his troops from
Tula to occupy Moscow. He helped to prevent an attack on Yeltsin's
headquarters in the White House of Russia, although he later claimed
that he did not
take sides during the conflict, and would have carried out a direct order
to take the White House.

In June 1992, Lebed assumed the
leadership of
Russia's 14th Army in Moldova, as the fighting between the Moldovans and
the separatists in the Dniester Moldovan Republic reached
its peak.
In the confrontation between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet in
September-October 1993, Lebed rejected appeals for help from both camps,
declaring on local Tiraspol television that the military should remain
neutral in such situations.

Many voters see Lebed as an honest and effective patriot who can
stop the collapse of the government while curbing crime and corruption.
Lebed's greatest achievement was to use military force in Moldova to stop
an ethnic conflict that had cost hundreds of lives. As the commander of the
Russian troops, he made clear that his sympathies lay on the side of the
ethnic Russian population. Nationalists credited him with preventing a
"second Croatia" (i.e. the expulsion of Russians from Moldova.) However, he
soon fell out with the local Russians in Moldova after accusing the
president of the pro-Russian Dniester Moldovan Republic,
Igor Smirnov, and
his colleagues of corruption. He told a press conference at the time that
he was "sick and tired of guarding the sleep and safety of crooks."

Lebed also appeals to Russian voters as an outsider who is not
responsible for the mess made by the Moscow elite. Although Lebed supported
Yeltsin in 1991, he quickly became a critic of his policies, particularly
the attempts to negotiate the withdrawal of Russian troops from Moldova. In
1994, he broke with his long-time colleague Defense Minister
Pavel Grachev
when he criticized him for not reforming the military. Grachev tried to
remove him from his post in August 1994, but had to back down when
Yeltsin
supported Lebed. Although Lebed favored the army's active role in Moldova,
he was extremely critical of the decision to intervene militarily in
Chechnya. As the campaign began, Lebed sarcastically offered to lead a
regiment into battle if it would be made up of the children and
grandchildren of "our glorious government and members of the parliament."

Lebed is not entirely new to politics as a profession. In the fall
of 1993, he won a seat in the Supreme Soviet of the separatist Dniester
Moldovan Republic with 88% of the vote. After the October 1993 violence in
Moscow, he demanded the sacking the Dniester Republic's minister for state
security and deputy minister for internal affairs who had sent soldiers to
defend the White House against Yeltsin's tanks. When his motion failed, he
resigned from the Supreme Soviet in protest.

Part II. Views and Political Activity

The general's platform underwent significant transformations
during the parliamentary election campaign and the presidential
campaign. His first famous ideological statement was his approval
of General Augusto Pinochet's success. He argued
that "preserving the army is the basis for preserving the government" and
that Pinochet was able to revive Chile by "putting the army in first
place." He wrote an article where he vigorously opposed
arms reductions and implied that Russia may face a serious
military confrontation within two or three years.
Recently, Lebed has had more praise for
General Charles de Gaulle,
also a strong leader, but one who has better democratic credentials.
However, Lebed is no fan of democracy. In a programmatic
article published in Nezavisimaya gazeta, Lebed
rejected democracy as harmful for Russia.
He asserted that the abundance of political parties "has so clouded the
brains of the average citizen" that the results are much worse for the
country than its addiction to vodka. As a result, the domestic political
situation is "out of control" and has significantly reduced the
authorities' ability to find social consensus in resolving Russia's
economic and political problems.

To launch his political career in Russia, Lebed chose as his
main ally Yuri Skokov, leader of the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO)
and a firm advocate of state intervention in the economy.
The KRO advocates a brand of nationalist
statism that seeks to win voters who oppose President Boris Yeltsin's
policies, but do not support any of Russia's numerous extremist parties.
Skokov and Lebed hoped to mobilize discontent caused by the pain of
introducing market reforms and cutbacks in military spending in favor of a
policy that reinvigorates state direction of the economy and strengthens
Russia's armed forces.

On October 18, Lebed announced the formation of a new group,
Honor and Motherland, whose ostensible purpose is to reform the military.

Lebed has had strong ties to the extreme Communists in the past,
joining the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the RSFSR in September
1990 at the nomination of the hard-line Communist Initiative Movement,
and recently
sought an alliance with
Zyuganov's "reformed" party, to no avail.
Although some voices in the liberal media have expressed support for
Lebed, he has long made clear his distaste for
Yeltsin and lately has
denounced the economic policies of
Yegor Gaidar. In his
Nezavisimaya gazeta
article, the general called for the creation of a coalition of "left,
left-centrist, and patriotic forces," presumably with him as the leader.
However, most leftist movements of Russia eventually ended up
endorsing Zyuganov in the 1996
presidential campaign.

Lebed has not escaped strong criticism in the Russian press. Some
members of the KRO rank-and-file present at its April founding congress
called him a "cheap populist" and a "lover of the effective phrase" because
of his penchant for presenting his ideas in cryptic aphorisms. An article
in the local press describing Lebed's visit to Perm in July denounced his
ideas, arguing that "nationalism is always the flag of war" and "the thirst
for strict order relies on force which cannot exist without blood."

Congress of Russian Communities received 4.29% of the party list
vote (the seventh place, behind the Communist Party of the Russian
Federation, the LDPR, Our Home Is Russia,
Yabloko, Women of Russia, and Communists of the USSR).
The latter two parties are considered close in their views to
the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and will not
produce successful presidential contenders. (Communists of the USSR
have already decided to back Gennady
Zyuganov, while one of the leaders of Women of Russia,
Yekaterina Lakhova, endorsed Yeltsin in a surprising political move.) Congress of
Russian Communities won 5 seats in one-mandate districts and
will therefore control 0.01% of the Duma seats. One of their
seats was won by Lebed himself, who won twice as many votes
as his nearest rival, local Mayor Nikolai Tyaglivy, in a single-mandate
constituency in the city of Tula. Lebed
announced on December 28, 1995, that he intends to run for president
in 1996.

On January 11, the Congress of Russian Communities
unanimously nominated Alexander Lebed to run for president
in June 1996.

In a bizarre twist of the campaign, Lebed joined the
leftist Popular Power,
the Duma faction led by former USSR Prime Minister
Nikolai Ryzhkov, on January 31, but then quit it on
March 5 after Ryzhkov decided to support Gennady Zyuganov for president.

On March 30, Lebed argued that Russia does not need an elected
parliament. Instead he called for a "small, highly professional Duma
that would be named by the president." Lebed also suggested
that the president should submit to a yearly popular referendum and
resign if he fails to gain the voters' support. Lebed spoke
at the congress of the Democratic Party of Russia which nominated him
for president.

Lebed and
Svyatoslav Fedorov announced
creation of the so-called "third force" alliance and made
a couple of joint statements with
Yavlinsky (on Chechnya and
on the economic integration of the former Soviet republics).
Instead of Sergei Glaziev's plan approved by
the Congress of Russian Communities, Lebed had
referred journalists to Yavlinsky
on a couple of occasions when questioned about his economic program.

Alexander Lebed was officially registered on April 19 (1,919,913
signatures of support were turned in by his initiative group).

Alexander Lebed accused
President Yeltsin
of "betraying" the soldiers in
Chechnya, in an article he published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta
on April 3. He said Yeltsin erred in launching
the recent wave of attacks, in which hundreds of Russian troops were killed,
only to sue for peace days later. He said that this stop-and-go policy was
reminiscent of the fighting last spring. He urged
Yeltsin to
push on for the military victory that he considers to be "very close."
Lebed said that "doubts can exist only before the beginning of
a war... We are fighting not so much for a specific territory but for
Russia's national dignity. Russia must announce to the world that it
will never again retreat."

In what appeared to be a 180-degree turn in his views on the military
reform, Lebed told RFE/RL on April 10 that he would drastically
cut the size of Russian military forces if elected president. Recent
Western estimates say the Russian army now has 91 divisions,
although many are severely undermanned and lacking in combat-readiness.
Lebed suggested that Russia now needs only 15 fully-manned
regular armored and infantry divisions supplemented by 5-6 airborne
brigades, plus 15 reserve divisions. Lebed suggested the Air
Force could be reduced from its current level of 6,000 planes to
1,000. Smaller forces would be more effective and less expensive to
maintain, the former general contended.

Lebed argued in Izvestia on April 25 that the
front-runners are not as different as they appear, since both
descended from the same "old communist nomenklatura." Lebed
portrayed Zyuganov and other
Communist Party leaders as the "younger, unsuccessful
but voracious brothers of the current authorities," who no longer
believe in the dogma of the Soviet period and merely aspire to
gain power. He also argued that
Zyuganov plays up his party's
staunch opposition to the current government, while
Yeltsin plays up the communist
threat, but these campaign postures are merely a
"game" designed to trick voters. The idea that voters must choose
the "lesser of two evils" is a threat to the
prospects of third-party candidates.

Generally, after having been rejected by the communists and other
leftist parties, Lebed was seemingly drifting towards
the liberals with some social-democratic flavor,
like Svyatoslav Fedorov
and Grigory Yavlinsky.

On May 6, Alexander Lebed denied any interest in the so-called
Third Force alliance with candidates
Grigory Yavlinsky and
Svyatoslav Fedorov, and declared he
would run on his own. Lebed said that "Someone gave birth to
this idea and it started to fly around in the air in ever decreasing
circles...Where did this bird come from? I don't know and I never was
interested in it". The Lebed announcement, which came a day
after reports that the participants in the Third Force were
successfully concluding their negotiations, runs counter to earlier
Lebed statements about the desirabilty of the alliance and its
imminent conclusion. Yeltsin has met
with Lebed shortly before the announcement. For quite a while
now, Yeltsin has been expected
to dump his unpopular Defence Minister, Pavel Grachev.
Yeltsin also met
Yavlinsky, and
the liberal economist later hinted that he was offered
the Prime Minister position, but refused. On May 7,
Yavlinsky outlined the conditions on
which he would agree to form an alliance with
Yeltsin. They include multiple
personnel changes in the president's team, the Checnya settlement,
and major changes in the economic policy, and are, therefore,
extremely unlikely to be met. Notice that Lebed would
have reasonably good chances to get approved as the Defense
Minister by the State Duma, while
Yavlinsky
would certainly be rejected as a new Prime Minister.

OMRI reported on May 27
that The Congress of Russian
Communities (KRO) voted at an extraordinary congress--held at
the request of more than 30 of its regional
branches--to remove the movement's leader, Yuri Skokov,
and named Dmitri Rogozin in his place. Rogozin
holds more radical nationalist views than Skokov.
Skokov was blamed for the congress' failure to overcome
the 5% barrier in
the December Duma election, particularly since Skokov
led the ticket and put Alexander Lebed in the number two
position. The congress is backing Lebed in the first round
of the presidential
election. Lebed sent a telegram thanking the KRO
for its support and backing steps to strengthen the Russian state,
unify the Russian people, and reduce the threat of civil war.

Lebed finished third in the first round with about 15%
of the vote and is now out of the presidential race.

He turned his third
place into a dramatic comeback
on June 18 when President Boris
Yeltsin gave him a top security job
and sacked his bitter rival in the army.
The president ditched his loyal defense minister, Pavel
Grachev, a former paratroop comrade whom
Lebed blames for
forcing him out of the army a year ago.
Yeltsin even hinted
Lebed could succeed him
as president in the year 2000.
Lebed,
who said 80 percent of his voters would
``understand'' his position, is now secretary of the powerful
Security Council and the president's national security adviser.